Interactive Fiction

In 2012, while searching to see if there was any update to the old Fabled Lands series, I came across Inkle. For a couple of years, their Inklewriter was my main platform for creating IF and exploring new techniques.

Since August 2015 I’ve been working with an IF software tool called Twine. I find it a lot more powerful than Inklewriter, allowing me a lot of freedom with complex variables like time, money, character stats and triggers. I’ve also learnt a fair amount on html and css through using it. A recent mini-project is a re-working of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade.

Take a look at A Day with Penguins (also titled A Short Long Day), a nice infotainment interactive story about a journey to see the penguins of Cape Crozier.

This was written in early 2014 and includes more than 30 unique photographs of the penguins of Cape Crozier. Can you find the albino penguin while exploring the icy waste?

More recently I’ve been pursuing producing a Crowdfunded Steampunk Adventure Gamebook – Steam Highwayman. I spent late 2016 attempting to build this on Twine, but my efforts became unrealistically overambitious, due to the capabilities of writing something with a software I was just learning, so I’ve returned to the print paradigm. Gamebooks are on their way back – both on mobile devices and, to lesser extent, in print. So I thought I should give it a try.